october 21, 2006
Beyond Economy: a Critical Participation with The Great Work
The human project and the Earth project must come into alignment or we risk undoing 65 million years of evolution; this imperative is the subject of Thomas Berry’s book The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future.
Our mission is, in his words, to reinvent the human at the species level, with a critical language, within the community of life systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience, and it is hope for me just to recite this set of phrases.
While Father Thomas Berry stresses clearly the dire urgency and horrific reality of our present planetary situation, he helps us to create a framework for survival by conjuring the possibility of a viable human in the Ecozoic Era.
This transition includes the creation of a new ontological Story, a shift in viewing the world as “a collection of objects [to] a communion of subjects” (16), and a reformation of the “four fundamental establishments that control the human realm: governments, corporations, universities, and religions - the political, economic, intellectual and religious establishments” (4) of the present era.
Following the economic strand, this paper will explore how Berry frames the pathway to becoming viable humans, while reflecting on how the work of Derrick Jensen supports and expands on Berry’s ideas. These two great thinkers are of different generations and come from very different backgrounds, yet cross-reference each other in these books. I will look at how they share perspective and politics, and where their trajectories differ.
Finally, in order to make a little more room for agency in some of Berry’s arguments, I will also weave in some post-structuralist perspectives regarding essentialism in my attempt of participating in the Great Work for a vibrant future.
To Thomas Berry every people has had a Great Work, such as building pyramids, or singing the patterns of the stars. Our Great Work is to shift from our present way of life, which is based on exploitation and destruction of not only our physical reality but also our psychic-spiritual realm, to a way of life that honors Life with every action, creating mutual enhancement for the community, environment, bioregion and, therefore, the entire cosmos.
Our bodies, minds, and worldviews are affected by our physicality, as the opposite is true: our material reality if affected by worldviews. How we acquire our basic life supplies, -our food, water, song, etc- is imbricated with affects on and from other beings and systems.
For centuries, humans gleaned their physical, artistic and spiritual needs from the ecosystem they participated in. This is no longer so. This entire realm is now the economic sphere and it has been colonized by corporations. Economics have become our primary referent. Not only does this shift affect our bodies, but also our planet.
Berry is insistently gentle in his language and does not call directly for the dismantling of the industrial, commercial, financial complex as do many others, such as Derrick Jensen, though Berry does make clear that a complete shift is urgently necessary. For both Jensen and Berry, this shift begins with taking a critical look at the history of our land acquisition, economic systems, and the history of our corporations.
How we view the land we live on, how Canada and America came to be, is part of our ontological Story. Our Story is imbricated in our identities, culture, politics, resource use, and energy expenditures. Both Thomas Berry and Derrick Jensen work through history to show that the normative North American Story is not rooted in a full and clear version of history.
North America is occupied land, taken though violent colonization and genocide; in the large-scale takings of land, corporations were born (Berry 121). The political and economic growth of North American is intimately entangled with corporations and large large-scale resource exploitation for economic gain. But, while lip service has always been that these gains are for every citizen, a critical look at history makes clear that an elite few prosper, while the masses, the non-humans, and the planet’s very life-processes suffer, to serve an elite few.
Derrick Jensen works deeper into this realm, dredging up piles of bloody facts, creating what Foucault would call a genealogy: a critical history that works to include what was omitted, deconstructing the reigning discourses, and considers the complex positions of the subjects in the storylines.
While Jensen explores these stories in visceral depth and aching length, Thomas Berry sketches a simple frame of five phases in our resource use, a device that allows the book to stay focused on transitioning to a mutually enhancing way of life. Berry’s tactic also allow polysemy for readers to participate in the re-making of meaning. The five phases Berry picks out can be summarized as: beginning in the land takings; the creation of canal and rail lines; the integration of electricity and petroleum into industrial and daily life, including the automobile; the rise of chemicals after WWII; and the Ecozoic Era.
Thomas Berry describes the Ecozoic Era as a time when communities learn to “align their own functioning and the limits of their activities to the possibilities of the Earth” (133), when the only “viable economic programs … are those that have an intimate relation to the land” (134) function, and when people “take responsibility for doing the essential things themselves” (135).
Berry does not give precise directions as to how exactly this transition can occur; in this way Thomas Berry and Derrick Jensen take a similar stance by providing only a framework for the work to be done. This allows and demands each person to listen to his/her own landbase and community to discern what actions are best. Earth needs us all to take responsibility, to learn how to live in our bioregion, as a community, in a mutually enhancing way.
There are many people working on creating models for change through enhancing local economic systems. The very concept of bioregionalism is gaining popularity. This year, the idea of the “100 mile diet” gained notoriety. This goal of this meal plan, as you might guess, is to eat only that which is created in a 100 mile radius from your home. Small organic farms are gaining customers as more people realize that local, organic food is healthy in innumerable ways.
People are even beginning to think beyond organics, looking to Permaculture, which is a method of design based on mimicking natural systems, as it aims to create healthy ecosystems that provide food, fuel and fiber for the human inhabitants in a way which not only respects healthy, natural limits, but is mutually enhancing for the biosphere (Quinney 54). One of the four main ethics of Permaculture is to give away surplus, precisely because of the effect this has on shifting our economic system.
Another major affirmation of this shift in thinking was the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank for their work in providing micro-credit to “create economic and social change from below” as a key method to creating lasting peace, true democracy, and gains in human rights (Nobel Committee 2006).
The successful colonization of our economy by the corporations Berry blames on their evocation of “the deepest of psychic compulsions towards limitless consumption” (120). It is here that I would like to use a post-structuralist argument to re-position this tendency as a not an essential human “compulsion”, but rather as a social construct of this culture, primarily because this positioning allows space for transcendence of the tendency, and also because a cross-cultural comparison might lead us to the conclusion that some communities did not exhibit such compulsions.
As Berry states repeatedly, life is an emergent process; everything is in a process of continual co-creation. Through our repeated daily actions, we form our material selves (Bulter 33), including our brain patterns. This positioning gives us agency. As Thomas Berry says, we must reinvent ourselves, with critical language, in a time-developmental context.
We need a new understanding of ourselves and the world.
Both Thomas Berry and Derrick Jensen are working towards developing a new ontological Story that positions humans as not the almighty species, entitled to exploit all, but rather as integral components of the cosmos. We must learn, through story and shared dream experience, that this land was and is sacred, that the world is to be venerated, that we are not ourselves without everything else.
The deleterious hyper-exploitation of our landbase in the name of economic gain must stop. We need to shift to a small market system of local production and consumption that functions within the community of life-systems in a mutually enhancing way. This imperative is our Great Work, and while patience is a virtue, the transition to an Ecozoic Era will be more graceful the sooner it occurs.
Works Cited
Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future. New York: Bell
Tower, 1999.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Jensen, Derrick. Endgame. New York: Seven Stories P, 2006.
Norwegian Nobel Committee. “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2006” 13 Oct. 2006.
Nobel Foundation. Retrived Oct. 28, 2006, from
Quinney, John. “Designing Sustainable Small Farms” The Mother Earth News,
July/August (1984): 54.
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